Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - How the Latin Alphabet Took Over the World

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

The Latin Alphabet has become the most widespread system of writing in the world. Its origins can be traced back thousands of years to Ancient Romans and to civilizations before that. It is probably the single biggest thing that we use today which originated in Rome. Today’s English alphabet, you know that one from the song, is a modification of the system which was used by the Romans, which has had some unique quirks in the past that most English speakers are unaware of. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Latin alphabet has become the most widespread system of writing in the world. Its origins can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Rome and to civilizations even before that. It's probably the biggest thing that we use today, which originated in Rome. Today's English alphabet, you know the one from the song, is a modification of that system which was used by the Romans, which has had some unique works in the past that most English speakers are unaware of. Learn more about the ABCs of the ABCs. on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok.

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in a search for salvation. This episode is brought to you by audible.com. If you're interested in the origins of language, especially the English language, the audiobook I would recommend, is the Adventure of English, the Biography of a Language, by Melvin Bragg. The book explains how a minor dramatic tongue wound up being a major world language due to the political and economic events in world history. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks

by going to Audiblerial.com slash everything everywhere. or clicking on the link in the show notes. The system of writing, which is used in most of the Western world today, is known as the Latin alphabet. This system of writing is used by every country in the Western Hemisphere, every country in sub-Saharan Africa, and all of Western and Northern Europe. It can also be found in various degrees in most other countries. As with most good Roman ideas, they stole their alphabet from someone else. The Roman alphabet was based on the Etruscan alphabet, which also came from the Italian peninsula.

The Etruscans based their alphabet on the Comerian Greek alphabet, which in turn was based on the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn was based on Egyptian hieroglyphics. If you go all the way back, the writing systems look nothing like what we have today, but with each step along the way, you can see how the change gradually occurred. The modern English alphabet has 26 characters. However, the ancient Roman alphabet only had 23 characters. The letters J, U, and W are all relatively recent editions. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church became the guardians of the Latin language, and in 1978, they added the letter J to the Latin alphabet. In 1978, John Paul II was elected Pope, and he insisted that his papal name in Latin be spelled with the J. Normally, it would be spelled Iowanus with an I, which is how his immediate predecessor, John Paul I,

the first, spelled it. Just like that, via papal decree, the letter J was added to the Latin language. With no J or U, you might be asking how Julius Caesar would have spelled his name. In the original Latin, it would have been spelled I-V-L-I-V-S. The I was used instead of the J and the V was used instead of a U to make Ulius. The English alphabet is unique in that it is one of the only European languages that uses the Latin alphabet but does not have any diacritical marks. Whereas most other languages will have letters with dots, lines, and dashes above them, them to clarify how they are pronounced. English is totally lacking in them, even though it probably

needs it more than any other language because we have so many stolen words. There used to be more than 26 letters in the English language. Many of them were abandoned over time, or they were just dropped as letters and used as other symbols. The best example is the letter Thorn. Thorn originally looked like the letter P flown at half staff. The round part was in the middle and not at the top. Over time, the way Thorne was drawn began to morph, and eventually people replaced it with the letter that it started to look like, the letter Y. Thorne used to represent the T-H sound. If you've ever seen a sign that used the words ye, that Y was the replacement for Thorne, and it was supposed to be a T-H-sound, so yee should really be pronounced the. So a sign which says, ye-old shop should really be pronounced the old shop. Thorne is still used. in Icelandic, and it makes the same sound. If you look in the show notes for today's

episode, I have the thorn character listed because it exists in Asky computer characters. Another letter which didn't make the cut is one you're probably familiar with, Amper Sand. Several hundred years ago, even as late as the 19th century, the Amperstand was considered the 27th letter of the alphabet by many English speakers. The character wasn't originally called Amperstand. It was called An or Et, and it meant the same thing that it does today. It got the name ampersand because when you read the alphabet at the end you would say

W-X-Y-Z and per se and. The per se part just meant it was by itself. The phrase and per se and eventually got merged into ampersand. Another letter you might have

seen is the long S. The long S was pronounced like the letter S and it looked like the integral symbol for mathematics or a or case F without the cross running through it. It existed alongside the S we know today, but with a host of rules for when it should be used. It was eventually abandoned in the 19th century because it served no real purpose and it was redundant with the normal S. Many of the early countries which adopted the Latin alphabet did so because they were Christian and the early church used Latin. That was

how non-romance languages like German and Polish came to use the characters. Many countries have gone out of their way to switch to the Latin alphabet. In some ways, the Latin alphabet is like the metric system. It has become a universal standard. Countries that don't have it have a large incentive to either convert to it or to use it alongside their native alphabet. In Turkey, after World War I in the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Carmel Adeturk moved Turkey to the Latin alphabet with 29 characters. Over the last 300 years, there have been many attempts to Latinize the Russian language by intellectuals. After the Communist Revolution in 1917, there was a serious attempt to switch all of the languages inside the Soviet Union to the Latin alphabet. They had actually

made large strides for many of the languages until Stalin came to power, who put the kibosh on the entire Latinization movement and moved everything to Cyrillic. This didn't stop several countries from making the change after the Soviet Union fell apart. Uzbekistan officially converted to Latin from Cyrillic in the early 1990s and has been in the early 1990s and has been transitioning ever since. Being a Turkic-based language, they were able to piggyback off of the efforts made by Turkey earlier in the 20th century. In 2007, Kazakhstan announced they were going to phase in Latin letters over a 10 to 15-year period. Likewise, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan have all announced plans to move from Cyrillic to Latin. Many countries have not

officially switched, but Latin is commonly used alongside other writing systems. In Serbia, Cyrillic is official, but Latin characters can be seen all over. Likewise, Bulgaria has been debating a switch, but hasn't officially done anything yet. Nonetheless, you can find Latin characters in common usage. China has also officially adopted the use of a Latin alphabet. They created an official trans-alliteration system called Hanu Pinyin, which is a formal way to write Chinese words with Latin characters.

Pinion was why the city of Peking was changed to Beijing. Pinion has been experimented with some schools in China as the first system for teaching children how to read because it can be taught phonetically. Once you know a few characters, you can figure out every word. Literacy in China often means having to know how to write at least 1,500 different characters. The Latin alphabet seems to be here to stay, and with characters hard-coded into our computers now, it's likely that this is going to remain the case for centuries to come. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAla.

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